Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-04-09 at 16:41, Ian B. Jacobs wrote:
>
>>Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On Tue, 2002-04-09 at 11:20, Ian B. Jacobs wrote:
>>> SW: There is a tone in the IETF about trying to
>>> have a mechanism to resolve URNs.
>>> TBL: Yes, those people who favor URNs in the
>>> IETF claim that they are building a mechanism to
>>> resolve URNs. We have a working resolution
>>> mechanism; building a second one is in general a
>>> bad idea.
>>>
>>>Clarification request. I assume that the URN resolution mechanism the
>>>IETF is building is DDDS. What is the W3C's "working resolution
>>>mechanism"?
>>>
>>The "We" above doesn't refer to W3C, it refers to the Internet
>>community. The resolution mechanism is the DNS.
>>
>
> I have to admit that DNS by itself sounds like a very weak solution to
> URN (and URI) resolution, especially in the light of things like:
>
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-urn-net-procedures-10.txt
> DDDS Part Five: URI.ARPA Assignment Procedures
>
> Also:
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2169.txt
> A Trivial Convention for using HTTP in URN Resolution (RFC 2169)
>
> There is the experimental:
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2168.txt
> Resolution of Uniform Resource Identifiers using the Domain Name System
>
> But somehow I don't think that's what you mean.
I did indeed mean DNS, though that may not have been what
TBL meant.
The DNS mechanism in HTTP space works, but is fragile.
From "Web Architecture from 50,000 Feet" [1]:
"The Achilles' heel of the HTTP space is the only centralized
part, the ownership and government of the root of the DNS tree.
As a feature common and mandatory to the entire HTTP Web, the DNS
root is a critical resource whose governance by and for the world
as a whole in a fair way is essential. This concern is not
currently addressed by the W3C, except indirectly though
involvement with ICANN."
Presumably since the world has invested a lot in this mechanism, I
have heard people suggest that the community try to fix it rather
than deploy another mechanism from scratch. See Persistent Domains
[2] as one proposal.
_ Ian
[1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Architecture
[2] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/PersistentDomains
--
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org) http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel: +1 718 260-9447